Wednesday, October 24, 2012

It's
a game. A game played on the streets of New York, for as long as
anyone can remember. It's called Ringolevio, and the rules are
simple. There are two sides, each with the same number of players.
There are no time limits, no intermissions, no substitutes and no
weapons allowed. There are two jails. There is one objective. Each
side tries to capture and jail all the members of the other side,
while maintaining the freedom of its own teammates. When everyone on
one side is captured, the other team wins. - “Ringolevio: A life
played for keeps,” Emmett Grogan, New York Review of Books
Classics, New York, 2008.

Emmett Grogan, Merry Prankster, co-founder of The Diggers

Six Shooter Junction -Though
it's not played in exactly the way it was played in the medieval port cities of
Genoa and Naples, Palermo and Venice, this elaborate game of hide and
go seek is deadly serious and very, very expensive.

In
fact, large corporations bet large sums on its outcome, as did the
middles ages combinations of merchants and shipping executives,
importers and landlords, and the post-war gangsters and gamblers of
New York's Cosa Nostra families, who staged enormous latter-day
tournaments between the street gangs of post-war New York in the
fifties and sixties.

Their
motive: gambling. Everybody wanted a piece of the action to see which
side would lose all its players to the others' jail first.

In
the very real life of 21st century America, the gamble is
the same, but it's played out on the streets, its results written in
blood, a deadly game gone wrong in a world spinning madly out of
control.

The
bet: Will the accused show up for trial, arraignment, any other form
of court appearance, or will the surety bonding company stand to lose
a sizable amount of funds placed on the off chance that the accused
does, in fact, take it on the lam?

Once
bonded, the body of the defendant actually becomes the chattel
property of the bonding agency, or “bondsman.” His bail agents –
a polite term for bounty hunter - need no other writ to pursue and
place him in custody, other than the court documents that show the
origin of his freedom. They literally own his body. They are legally
authorized to use deadly force to reclaim its possession, if need be.

To
the professional criminal, it's a cost of doing business. To society,
it's a cost of the quality of life.

The
rules, of course, are quite different than those used in Mr. Grogan's
accounts of the huge Ringolevio games played in his youth on the
streets of Brooklyn and Manhattan.

It's
nationwide and all over the map. And it's here to stay, in big
cities, small towns, metropolitan areas and rural backwoods counties
alike.

Fifty
cents worth of nothing with a mark-up of thousands of percentage
points, the profits measured in terms of gain and loss in human
souls, blood, misery, as measured against the fabulous wealth
obtained by only the few – some shrewd, others outrightly luck, and
still others vicious and mean enough to kill at will, in the blink of
an eye, the flash of a hand sign, the turn of a phrase.

A
recent survey of the bonding agencies active in McLennan County
reveals that 20 firms – 12 of them sole proprietorships – compete
for the ten percent fees collected on bonds set by area judges of
about $35,000,000, according to figures on file for fiscal year
2011-2012.

That
adds up to $3.5 million in bond fees for the players if you figure a
10 percent fee on each transaction.

The
only rules governing the finances of the business are that sole
proprietorships must place a minimum $50,000 cash bond backed either
by certificates of deposit or real property deeds.

Should
these operators' surety reserves fall below the minimum required to
bond an accused offender out of custody, they are required to hustle
to a bank and arrange to replenish their supply of cash guarantee,
according to County Treasurer Bill Helton.

Chartered
corporate insurance companies such as Allegheny Casualty Insurance or
International Fidelity are considered good for the risk based on the
corporate charters issued in the base states of operation.

The
U.S. Constitutional guarantee of reasonable bail and the Texas
Constitution and Code of Criminal Procedure both apply. Bond shall
not be excessive to the point that is it used as a punishment against
one who has been accused of a crime.

Put
up the dough, and you can go, but there is a wrinkle in that scheme.
Excessive jail overcrowding has been deemed a cruel and unusual form
of punishment. County governments are often forced to find alternate
means of clearing out their jails to avoid expensive sanctions
imposed by the Texas Commission on Jail Standards. This involves
paying other counties or commercial enterprises large amounts of
money to house, care for and feed prisoners from their jurisdictions.

The
case of Steven Peace is one such case that falls within the
well-known and worn-out dynamic.

A
Grand Jury indicted Mr. Peace for the shooting death of Emuel Bowers,
III in 2010. Prosecutors are seeking to prove that the murder of two
young men and maiming of two others who sat in a car at Lakewood
Villas Apartments in March of 2011 was carried out in retaliation for
the Bowers killing, a brutal method of settling some unknown conflict
over a business practice or arrangement involving drugs. Ricky
Cummings, 23, is facing a jury in 19th Criminal District
Court at present for those killings. He is the first of four
defendants who will answer to the charge of capital murder in the
case.

In
a first ever case of a personal recognizance release of a McLennan
County offender indicted for murder, local attorney Alan Bennett
arranged the release of his client Steven Peace in December of 2011
on a writ of habeas corpus because prosecutors had failed to announce
they were ready for trial within the 90 days allowed under criminal
procedure rules. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals ordered the case
remanded to a McLennan County Criminal District Court for a bond
reduction. The release was obtained by placing two $50,000 chattels
against Mr. Peace's real property and the terms of his release house
arrest under electronic monitoring by an ankle bracelet.